We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Sunday, October 15. 2017

Executive orders allowed the past administration to keep the program alive. They allow this administration to destroy it. Like his predecessor, President Donald Trump has been frustrated by lack of action in Congress on Obamacare. Like his predecessor, he has resorted to executive fiat to get around that obstruction. Only instead of frantically trying to save the troubled program, he is yanking out the life-support cords installed by President Barack Obama.

This week saw two executive actions. With the first, Trump is trying to expand health insurance options outside of the Obamacare exchange for individual insurance plans (which will have the side effect of making on-exchange policies less attractive to healthy customers).

The second is even more serious: After threatening it for months, the president has finally ended the cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers, which subsidize the provision of special policies with lower out-of-pocket expenses for people who make less than 250 percent of the federal poverty line. At the very least, this will probably mean a further increase in premiums, and growing instability in at least the parts of the individual market that aren’t eligible for subsidies to offset the increase. At worst, especially if it gets bogged down in lawsuits, it may cause insurers to say “enough is enough,” leaving broad areas of the country without any firm willing to sell individual policies through the Obamacare exchanges.

While the Congressional Budget Office has issued a delightfully counterintuitive forecast that ending the subsidies could actually increase insurance coverage, there’s little question in my mind that these policies are bad for the exchanges. 1 At the very least, I think we can all agree that they put the exchanges at greater risk. There is also little question that this is at least part of the reason that the administration is pursuing them. And yet, believe it or not, there are still arguments for both.

It has become evident that millions of uninsured Americans are uninterested in buying insurance on the exchanges, because it’s too expensive, or the “narrow networks” don’t cover enough doctors and hospitals. The new options the administration aims to create could be a genuine boon to those people. If you have spent years bemoaning the dire fate of the uninsured, you have to take that benefit seriously.

As for ending the subsidies … what am I, some sort of monster? Do I just hate the poor so much that I can’t stand to see them getting help paying for health care? Well, no. I have no particular objection to the payments as policy. Except for one small thing, which is that they seem to be sort of illegal...

Said the clattering site robot(s), as yet unprogrammed to speak honestly to the fact that these costs are the byproduct of the medical field having been slowly converted into a federal vassal for decades, in so many stripes you can't ever condense the argument down to one cause and its effect.

Clattering site robot(s) only allude to effects, the inevitable, purported solution to which is complete central control. Why bother with middle managers when single payer is so wonderful.

And yes, the ostensible right was there at every step actually aiding this takeover. I expect them to take definitive action against this (or any other) corpocratic, oligarchic monopoly when pigs fly. Hell, it employs them.

Meh: these costs are the byproduct of the medical field having been slowly converted into a federal vassal for decades, in so many stripes you can't ever condense the argument down to one cause and its effect.

There are numerous reasons why medical costs have increased, but a primary reason is due to technological innovations in medicine, the application of which requires far more resources than medicine of the past. Once upon a time, a country doctor might prescribe ginger tea and bed rest for severe angina pains for $75, now a team of doctors and medical professionals, equipped with a complex of modern technological tools, might perform heart bypass surgery for $75,000 in the U.S. (considerably less in other countries).

Unlike your recent comment, we posted facts from the International Federation of Health Plans concerning the cost of coronary bypass surgery, as well as information on a traditional remedy. See Tabassum & Ahmad, Role of natural herbs in the treatment of hypertension, Pharmacognosy Reviews 2011: Ginger "acts to improve blood circulation and relaxes muscles surrounding blood vessels."

The clattering continues. Can't someone turn this infernal thing off? Does it have a human master or is it now plugged in over on some deserted island where nobody can get to it - or wants to - like that scene from the movies?

Anyway, note how the site robot issued the usual diversion - one as far as single payer medicine goes is and was factless - and then, as if it was inscribed in the very annals of time, substitutes it as a comprehensive truth; the Socialist's Grand Unifying Theory and Guide to the Galaxy.

Naturally, us normals call this begging the question. It's an obvious and transparent ploy but you have to give credit to the dork who thought to make it the most-used routine the dang machine has. I mean, you must see it ten times a day.

There is and has been a concerted effort to dismiss any claim that Obama was born in Kenya. The MSM actively seeks out anyone who makes such a claim for ridicule because they are desperate to spike this story. Probably, sooner or later someone will prove it to be true but they will do so at their peril.

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